This
Harper's Weekly cartoon by Thomas Nast features Senator Allen
Thurman of Ohio desperately grasping for the illusive presidential
nominations of the Democratic and Greenback Parties.
Allen Thurman was born in
Virginia in 1813, but moved with his family to Ohio two years
later. In 1835, he was admitted to the Ohio bar and became the law
partner of his uncle, William Allen, who soon entered the U.S.
Senate. In 1844, Thurman was himself elected to Congress, entering
the House of Representatives as its youngest member. As a Democrat, he
upheld the party's positions on tariff and territorial expansion,
supporting Democratic president James K. Polk's declaration of war
against Mexico. Thurman sided with the Whigs, however, in support
of government-funded internal improvements.
Thurman decided not to run for
reelection in 1846, and returned to his private law practice. In 1851,
he was appointed to the state supreme court and served for five years,
one as chief justice, before returning to his law practice. During the
Civil War, Thurman supported the war effort, while encouraging political
compromise and a peaceful settlement. He joined other Northern
Democrats in criticizing Lincoln administration policies, especially
emancipation and violations of civil liberties.
In 1867, Thurman ran for
governor of Ohio, but lost narrowly to Rutherford B. Hayes. The next year,
however, the Democratic state legislature elected Thurman to the U.S.
Senate, where he was a strong voice against the Reconstruction policies
of the Republican Party. In 1874, he was reelected to a second term in
the Senate. When the 1876 presidential election produced an
Electoral College crisis, Thurman helped forge the solution of creating
a special commission to resolve the controversy and served as one of its
members. During the 46th Congress (1879-1881), he served as Senate
president pro tem.
Throughout most of his public
career, Thurman had taken a "hard-money" stance in favor of
the gold standard. In the late 1870s, he suddenly switched to
supporting the "soft-money" position of printing paper money
("greenbacks") in order to spur inflation and alleviate the
debt burden of families and individuals. Critics like Harper's
Weekly believed his political turnabout was part of a calculated
effort to win the Democratic presidential nomination in 1880.
Thurman had been a favorite-son candidate of the Ohio delegation in 1876
and hoped to enhance his chances at the upcoming national
convention.
Ohio's political party conventions in
1879 (referred to in the cartoon) generated much attention and
speculation by the national press. The state conventions' primary
task was to nominate gubernatorial candidates, and political watchers
wondered whether the Democrats would select Thurman and the Republicans
choose Treasury Secretary John Sherman, with the ultimate winner able to
use the office as a stepping-stone to a presidential nomination the next
year.
On the left of this cartoon, a
placard reports Sherman's statement, which fooled no one, that he is
only in Ohio to repair fences on his farm. The cartoonist uses the
notion as a visual metaphor for Thurman caught on a fence because of his
monetary views and unable to accept the 1880 presidential nominations of
either the Democratic Party (depicted as a bourbon bottle) or the
Greenback Party (drawn as the rag baby, symbol of inflationary paper
money). The "Ohio
Idea" also alludes to an inflationary monetary policy. In
1879, both Thurman and Sherman finally decided against seeking their
party's gubernatorial nomination, fearing that a loss in the closely
contested state would impair their presidential candidacies.
The next year, as expected,
both men entered the presidential sweepstakes. After winning the
popular vote in 1876, only to lose the presidency by vote of the
Electoral Commission, Democrats thought they had an excellent chance to
retake the White House in 1880 for the first time since before the Civil
War. Ill health forced Samuel Tilden, the 1876 nominee, to drop
out of contention. Thurman was loyally backed by the Ohio
delegation, but failed to pick up significant support outside his home
state. On the second ballot, the Democratic National Convention
chose General Winfield Hancock as its standard-bearer over Senator
Thomas Bayard of Delaware and Congressman Samuel Randall of
Pennsylvania.
Sherman fared better at the
Republican convention, but the deadlocked delegates turned to his
campaign manager, Congressman James Garfield, instead. The
Greenback-Labor Party nominated General James Weaver of Iowa. In
1881, the Ohio legislature, now in the hands of Republicans, elected
Sherman to the U.S. Senate seat, defeating Thurman's bid for a third
term. In 1888, President Grover Cleveland named the aging Thurman
as his vice-presidential running mate, but the ticket lost in the
general election.
For more information on the 1880 election, visit
HarpWeek’s Presidential Elections
website.
Robert C. Kennedy